Human Connectome Studies Related To Human Disease

The original Human Connectome Project focused on gathering data from healthy young adults, aged 21-35, to build a high-quality dataset for comparability with other populations. As a natural extension of that work, a number of studies have been funded to gather data on healthy humans of other ages, ranging from birth to nonagenarians and beyond.

This series of studies has been funded by the National Institutes of Health to apply HCP-style data collection toward subject cohorts at risk for or suffering from diseases or disorders affecting the brain. These studies include:

The Connectome Coordinating Facility (CCF) will be available for additional guidance, once it is established (see below).

What MRI hardware is needed for HCP data acquisition protocols?

Multiband pulse sequences used in HCP fMRI and dMRI are available on multiple Siemens 3T platforms (Prisma, Skyra, and Trio) using 32-channel head coils and on the Siemens 7T scanner; they are currently being implemented for GE and Phillips platfoms. Email Essa Yacoub (yaco0006@umn.edu) for how to obtain these pulse sequences and/or obtain additional guidance.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) benefits from high maximal gradient strength, as is available on the Siemens Prisma (80 mT/m) as well as the customized Siemens MAGNETOM Connectom scanners at WashU (100 mT/m; see Sotiropoulos et al., 2013) and MGH (300 mT/m; see Setsompop et al., 2013).

What are the HCP processing pipelines for the HCP protocol?

See Glasser et al. (2013) for an overview of the HCP Minimal PreProcessing (MPP) pipelines, whose goals include distortion correction, motion correction, cross-modal alignment, generation of surfaces and subcortical segmentation, and cross-subject alignment to a standard CIFTI grayordinates space, and which encompass:

Structural preprocessing (PreFreeSurfer, FreeSurfer, PostFreeSurfer)

fMRI preprocessing

dMRI preprocessing

Additional HCP processing pipelines include:

FIX denoising for rfMRI

Level 2 (cross-run) and Level 3 (cross-subject) tfMRI processing

Other HCP pipelines for advanced processing of rfMRI data and better surface-based alignment across subjects are currently under development.

What if the population we propose to study cannot handle the full HCP protocol (4hr imaging, several hr behavioral testing)?

The HCP is currently undertaking a Lifespan Pilot Project that includes scanning protocols similar to those for the WU-Minn Young Adult HCP except shorter in duration and amenable to children and older adults.

Detailed information about these modified behavioral and imaging protocols is available here.

What is the Connectome Coordination Facility (CCF) and how can I plan to make use of it?

A Connectome Coordination Facility (CCF), centered at Washington University (WashU) and also involving the University of Minnesota (UMinn) is expected to be established in 2015.

The WashU HCP team will host data sharing as part of an expanded ConnectomeDB database currently under development.

Imaging data from the Lifespan Pilot Project is being made available through ConnectomeDB.

This will include data obtained from 3 scanners used by the WU-Minn HCP consortium (Siemens 3T MAGNETOM Connectom at WashU; Siemens 3T Prisma and 7T at UMinn) and one scanner used by the MGH team (Siemens 3T MAGNETOM Connectom).

Will the CCF help manage and process the data collected in projects funded by the Connectomes Related to Human Disease FOA?

While all awardees will be required to submit their data to the CCF, the methods they use internally to manage, process, and analyze their data will be at their own discretion and expense.

The CCF plans to provide documentation and example datasets that illustrate how to set up HCP pipelines, test them with example data, and evaluate that they are working properly.

Awardees who wish to work directly with the CCF to manage their study data as part of the study’s internal operations should contact Dan Marcus (dmarcus@wustl.edu) to discuss logistical and budgetary considerations.

Do I need to include a budget in my proposal for CCF data hosting?

It depends. If you plan to implement the HCP data acquisition and preprocessing pipelines at your institution and then send the data to the CCF, no additional budget request will be needed. If you plan to collaborate with the CCF to implement additions to or changes from the existing HCP data collection or data analysis process, you should request an appropriate subcontract budget to work with the CCF. If you plan to propose to use data analysis pipelines in addition to the ones that currently exist, it is expected that those pipelines will be made available to the research community via the CCF.

How will access to CCF data be regulated?

NIH expects that data hosted on CCF will be made broadly available: “Applicants must use appropriate consent forms to allow the data to be deposited in and distributed from the Connectome Coordination Facility. Those consent forms must make the data broadly available to qualified researchers”.

NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research

The Human Connectome Project and Connectome Coordination Facility are funded by the National Institutes of Health,
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published on this site. Last updated 05/19/2016 15:50:08.

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